Hi Eternal Now
When you encounter the painfulness from the body for the long
hour during meditation, how is mind contemplation on painfulness?
How you handle it?
Well, so far I have never had the experience of encountering
painfulness for long hours during meditation. But I think what is
important is to let go of all mental resistance and relax in a
state of mindfulness. Be aware of the sensations but not to be
attached to the sensations. Of course, also see a doctor, take your
medicine or apply whatever things that eases the pain.
I think the following excerpts by Ven Gunaratana (btw did you
read his book Mindfulness in Plain English? I think its a good
read) might be helpful, and it beautifully described the
possibility to be "nondual" with sensations of pain and thus
freedom from pain:
http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe10.html
Problem 1
Physical Pain
Nobody likes pain, yet everybody has some sometime. It is one of
life's most common experiences and is bound to arise in your
meditation in one form or another. Handling pain is a two-stage
process. First, get rid of the pain if possible or at least get rid
of it as much as possible. Then, if some pain lingers, use it as an
abject of meditation.
The first step is physical handling. Maybe the pain is an illness
of one sort or another, a headache, fever, bruises or whatever. In
this case, employ standard medical treatments before you sit down
to meditate: take your medicine, apply your liniment, do whatever
you ordinarily do. Then there are certain pains that are specific
to the seated posture. If you never spend much time sitting
cross-legged on the floor, there will be an adjustment period. Some
discomfort is nearly inevitable. According to where the pain is,
there are specific remedies. If the pain is in the leg or knees,
check you pants. If they are tight or made of thick material, that
could be the problem. Try to change it. Check your cushion, too. It
should be about three inches in height when compressed. If the pain
is around your waist, try loosening your belt. Loosen the waistband
of your pants is that is necessary. If you experience pain in your
lower back, your posture is probably at fault. Slouching will never
be comfortable, so straighten up. Don't be tight or rigid, but do
keep your spine erect. Pain in the neck or upper back has several
sources. The first is improper hand position. Your hands should be
resting comfortably in your lap. Don't pull them up to your waist.
Relax your arms and your neck muscles. Don't let your head droop
forward. Keep it up and aligned with the rest of the
spine.
After you have made all these various adjustments, you may find you
still have some lingering pain. If that is the case, try step two.
Make the pain your object of meditation. Don't jump up and down and
get excited. Just observe the pain mindfully. When the pain becomes
demanding, you will find it pulling your attention off the breath.
Don't fight back. Just let your attention slide easily over onto
the simple sensation. Go into the pain fully. Don't block the
experience. Explore the feeling. Get beyond your avoiding reaction
and go into the pure sensations that lie below that. You will
discover that there are two things present. The first is the simple
sensation--pain itself. Second is your resistance to that
sensation. Resistance reaction is partly mental and partly
physical. The physical part consists of tensing the muscles in and
around the painful area. Relax those muscles. Take them one by one
and relax each one very thoroughly. This step alone probably
diminishes the pain significantly. Then go after the mental side of
the resistance. Just as you are tensing physically, you are also
tensing psychologically. You are clamping down mentally on the
sensation of pain, trying to screen it off and reject it from
consciousness. The rejection is a wordless, "I don't like this
feeling" or "go away" attitude. It is very subtle. But it is there,
and you can find it if you really look. Locate it and relax that,
too.
That last part is more subtle. There are really no human words to
describe this action precisely. The best way to get a handle on it
is by analogy. Examine what you did to those tight muscles and
transfer that same action over to the mental sphere; relax the mind
in the same way that you relax the body. Buddhism recognizes that
the body and mind are tightly linked. This is so true that many
people will not see this as a two-step procedure. For them to relax
the body is to relax the mind and vice versa. These people will
experience the entire relaxation, mental and physical, as a single
process. In any case, just let go completely till you
awareness slows down past that barrier which you yourself erected.
It was a gap, a sense of distance between self and others. It was a
borderline between 'me' and 'the pain'. Dissolve that barrier, and
separation vanishes. You slow down into that sea of surging
sensation and you merge with the pain. You become the pain. You
watch its ebb and flow and something surprising happens. It no
longer hurts. Suffering is gone. Only the pain remains, an
experience, nothing more. The 'me' who was being hurt has gone. The
result is freedom from pain.
This is an incremental process. In the beginning, you can expect to
succeed with small pains and be defeated by big ones. Like most of
our skills, it grows with practice. The more you practice, the
bigger the pain you can handle. Please understand fully. There is
no masochism being advocated here. Self- mortification is not the
point.
This is an exercise in awareness, not in sadism. If the pain
becomes excruciating, go ahead and move, but move slowly and
mindfully. Observe your movements. See how it feels to move. Watch
what it does to the pain. Watch the pain diminish. Try not to move
too much though. The less you move, the easier it is to remain
fully mindful. New meditators sometimes say they have trouble
remaining mindful when pain is present. This difficulty stems from
a misunderstanding. These students are conceiving mindfulness as
something distinct from the experience of pain. It is not.
Mindfulness never exists by itself. It always has some object and
one object is as good as another. Pain is a mental state. You can
be mindful of pain just as you are mindful of breathing.
The rules we covered in Chapter 4 apply to pain just as they apply
to any other mental state. You must be careful not to reach beyond
the sensation and not to fall short of it. Don't add anything to
it, and don't miss any part of it. Don't muddy the pure experience
with concepts or pictures or discursive thinking. And keep your
awareness right in the present time, right with the pain, so that
you won't miss its beginning or its end. Pain not viewed in the
clear light of mindfulness gives rise to emotional reactions like
fear, anxiety, or anger. If it is properly viewed, we have no such
reaction. It will be just sensation, just simple energy. Once you
have learned this technique with physical pain, you can then
generalize it in the rest of your life. You can use it on any
unpleasant sensation. What works on pain will work on anxiety or
chronic depression. This technique is one of life's most useful and
generalizable skills. It is patience.